Friday Facts #80 - Crazy start

[Drury]

There seem to be two general ideas for rocket launching - you either lock the player's movement and force him to stare at it from a fixed perspective. This would fix the issue of faking the vertical motion entirely. The other idea is to let the player move around and try to fake it by other means.

The former idea would be easy to implement and generally reliable, albeit wouldn't mesh well with the idea of frequent launches and restricting the player's freedom for the duration. The latter idea is the exact opposite, excellent for gameplay allowing the player full freedom over their actions at all times, but being difficult to implement and guaranteed not to look good in every possible scenario.

[Gusop]

Found this on a Spanish site:

Looks awesome but what is the purpose?

[FishSandwich]

Looks awesome but what is the purpose?

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-73

[TheDude1972]

There seem to be two general ideas for rocket launching - you either lock the player's movement and force him to stare at it from a fixed perspective. This would fix the issue of faking the vertical motion entirely. The other idea is to let the player move around and try to fake it by other means.

The former idea would be easy to implement and generally reliable, albeit wouldn't mesh well with the idea of frequent launches and restricting the player's freedom for the duration. The latter idea is the exact opposite, excellent for gameplay allowing the player full freedom over their actions at all times, but being difficult to implement and guaranteed not to look good in every possible scenario.

First idea sounds fine with me, but depends on how many launches you would have. Seeing that most of us make ridiculously huge bases this will be a problem in the long run. But again fine with me if this prevents endless bugs trying to get the other way working.

But why not let the rocket move on the Y axis as mentioned in the newsletter and make it so that it becomes smaller and smaller and faster and faster just like a real launch, this way the player wouldn't be able to keep up when trying to follow it along the Y axis. And of course the shadow you must have on a separate thread so you can delay and steer it to the side a little to give the impression that the rocket is getting higher and higher.

But then again I'm not a professional programmer and never used that engine, but hey ideas help right?

Keep up the good work guys, love factorio and I recommend it to everyone!

[katyal]

How about having the rocket start to nose towards the player with it eventually flying right at us head on, getting larger and larger

[ssilk]

Because the correct view would be, that the rockets gets bigger and bigger. And the shadow disappears. And depending on viewing angle (you stand left or right of it), the rocket shifts right or left. And the lights from the rockets illuminates differently...

We should stop development here and redo Factorio in 3D. That would be really pointless.

[Tyr4el]

Welcome to the team, noobie . I look forward to playing what you create!

[Align]

I suppose the simplest possible workaround/hack for the rocket is to make the screen brighten (from the rocket engine flames) until it can't be seen through before deleting the rocket and unbrightening.

[Piranha]

I always figured it would just vanish (like opacity turn to 0 from the nose to the tail) after a bit of height was gained. Seemed like the most logical to me, that way if people chase the rocket it wouldn't matter.. if you think about it our view is only so many degrees.. so from the launch we could only see the rocket for x amount no matter where we stand before it is gone since we can not tit our heads up.

[MF-]

Yeah

Just move it on the Y axis and alpha-alway in a couple of tiles.
Even 3x the rocket height could be well enough.

That would indeed be the simplest way of dealing with it.
I think that might even be the default way 2D games do it.